The “Lucky Moose Bill,” as Conservative MP Chungsen Leung called it this week, received royal assent on Thursday. Named for the Toronto Chinatown supermarket that became ground zero for an outraged discussion about citizens’ arrests and the rights of crime victims, Bill C-26 “reinforces the right of business owners to protect their property,” Mr. Leung said in a statement. “Canadians demanded that we change the law after David Chen was arrested for defending his property and we’ve responded by saying that we agree with their common sense.”

Mr. Chen, proprietor of the Lucky Moose, was famously prosecuted for nabbing and confining an inveterate shoplifter, Anthony Bennett, an hour after Mr. Bennett had been caught on tape helping himself to the merchandise. The previous law stipulated that a property-owner “may arrest without warrant a person whom he finds committing a criminal offence on or in relation to that property” — but not, as Mr. Chen did, later.

Laws crafted to address hot-button issues often overreach. For better or for worse, C-26 is not such a law. For all the Conservatives’ talk of citizen empowerment, it makes a very modest change: Now a property-owner can arrest a criminal “within a reasonable time after the offence is committed,” provided he “believe[s] on reasonable grounds that it is not feasible in the circumstances for a peace officer to make the arrest.”

The obvious question, then, is: What does “reasonable” mean?

“The reasonableness of any action has long been determined by our courts,” Justice Minister Rob Nicholson told reporters in Toronto’s Chinatown on Wednesday. “And so we don’t put a time limit on it, say it must be done within an hour. … You may be in circumstances where it would take longer than that or shorter than that.”

That sounds, well, reasonable. But it does raise a few questions about the impetus for this law. The government has been more than happy to frame it as a sort of retroactive justice for Mr. Chen’s ordeal. But we have no idea if the courts would consider the one-hour time frame in his case “reasonable” or not. Conceivably, Mr. Chen could just as easily be charged under the revised law.

In fact, you could argue it might now be easier to charge Mr. Chen. The wording about considering the “feasibility” of having the police make the arrest is brand new; the previous law stated only that detainees had to be turned over to the police as quickly as possible. On the face of it, there is nothing remotely unfeasible about police arresting a thief on Toronto’s Dundas Street West. It’s not like nabbing a cattle rustler in the Old West. Toronto Police’s 52 Division headquarters is 350 metres away. Yet Mr. Chen had terrible trouble convincing the police to pay any mind of shoplifters. Previously he had made shoplifters wait up to five hours for police to arrive, only to talk him out of pressing charges.

“It’s important to note that all of these new powers of citizen’s arrest apply if it’s not feasible in the circumstances to call a police officer,” Mr. Nicholson stressed at the press conference. “I want to emphasize these reforms will not in any way alter the role that police play in Canadian society.”

Well, there’s the rub. What is that role? Canadians are asking that a lot these days, in many different circumstances.

Ultimately, Bill C-26 doesn’t address the most basic confusion about the case to which it has been pegged: It was one thing for police to arrest Mr. Chen in the first place. There were allegations that he had roughed up Mr. Bennett. (One’s heart bleeds for him.) It was quite another to pursue charges against him, and quite another besides to grant Mr. Bennett a lighter sentence in exchange for a guilty plea and his testimony against Mr. Chen. To most Canadians, this represented a baffling, offensive, total moral inversion. That Mr. Chen was eventually acquitted did nothing to clarify the matter.

The only logical conclusion, then as now, is that our legal system is utterly hell-bent on reserving the powers of law-enforcement for police. I see nothing in the so-called Lucky Moose Law that would noticeably impede their efforts in that regard. If it’s a problem — and I think it is — then it isn’t one that we can legislate away.

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